A Place in Hokkaido with a View of the Sea
by Kurt Caswell
New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree by Utagawa Hiroshige
Kabari village sits at the edge of the Hidaka Mountains near the place the Mu and Saru rivers flow into the sea. The Hidaka Mountains form a rain shadow along the coast, so in winter, even as the snow is very deep up high, the snow is very light on the sea. Sika deer and red fox and brown bear live in these mountains, and when the bear go underground for winter, the deer and fox come down out of the heavy snows and into the village.
After Christmas, I traveled by train from Chitose—the small town in Hokkaido where I worked as an English teacher—south to Kabari village to stay for a few days in my friend Matsui’s small house. The small house sits on a hill with a view of the sea, and behind it is a big hill with a big house. The big house and the land the small house sits on belong to a man named Tanowei.
The small house is twelve feet by twelve feet, a perfect square, with a sink and stove on the north wall, a bathroom with no bath on the east, and on the south and west walls are big windows looking outward through the woods toward the sea. A ladder ascends over the front door to a sleeping loft. The main floor is covered with tatami, a kotatsu at the center—a square hole in the floor over which a table is fixed. You sit at the table with your feet in the hole where an electric heater warms the space beneath. Before electricity, a brazier was used. For added warmth, you stretch a kakefuton (duvet) over the top of the table to trap the heat below and then place another tabletop over that.
My friend Matsui and his American wife are writers, so the small house is suitable as a retreat from the world to do what it is that writers do. With the kotatsu, the small house is ideal for working early in the morning when it is coldest and working across the long bleed of the day through the sun until the shadows are long on the snow, and then you rest and eat and drink into the evening hours and follow sleep into the morning so that you may do it all over again, and then again the next day, and each day after that, because those are the best of all of your days. If you write with paper and pencil, slowly and carefully, pausing to sharpen your pencil with a knife you have sharpened to sharpen the pencil, that is even better. So seated there at the kotatsu, your legs in the well with the heater on and the kakefuton around your body up to your waist, a cup of hot coffee ready at hand, your notebook and pen, the sun breaking a little now over the sea and through the woods, and the clear, cold barks of the foxes on the hills in that snowy dawn, you feel very good and very happy about everything that is coming.
On the page, you are writing about the many experiences you’ve had in Hokkaido, experiences built up in your mind and in your heart so powerfully they spill over. You go about it in the simplest way, writing about how it was and what happened and how you felt when it happened. You keep some books by your side as you write, and you look up now and again out of the big windows onto the ground covered in snow and the snow between the trees bereft of leaves and you listen to the foxes, their clear, cold barks, and somehow what is in those books and what is happening outside the small house as you write become part of the story you are telling about another time and another place in Hokkaido. You are not interested in making a political statement, nor do you desire to bend the world to your agenda or ask for special consideration for your private wounds. You let all that go. Everybody has an agenda. Everybody has wounds. You are just happy to say what happened and what it felt like and maybe you try to understand.
In the cold that morning with the pleasantness of the kotatsu, I lit the oil heater against the wall to warm the cabin and help my hands which were cold and stiff. I kept the pencil sharp by sharpening it with the knife. I made my notes in the notebook. I drank the coffee I had made.
When I heard the barking of the foxes, I thought about a story I had heard about foxes gathering at an ancient hackberry tree near the Oji Inari Shinto shrine in Kita City near Tokyo. The Inari sect of Shintoism worships Inari, the god of the rice fields, and the fox is his messenger. On New Year’s Eve, so the story goes, foxes gather around the tree at the shrine. On their journey to the tree, they set small fires, or they themselves become fires. The local rice farmers who worship Inari call them foxfires and use them as a measure to predict the next season’s rice harvest. The more foxfires, the better the harvest. Remembering this story, I could see in my mind the 1857 woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige titled New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, which was part of his series One Hundred Views of Edo. I could see the darkened background with the darkened tree at the center, a starry sky overhead and the bright glow of the foxes illuminating the tree where they gathered and burned.
Seated there in the small house at the kotatsu, I wrote it all out and finished the part I was trying to make clear, and then put the notebook and the pencil and knife away because the sun was now up and it was not early morning any longer but daytime. Tanowei had invited me to come up to the house at 10:00 a.m.
I washed up at the sink and dressed in jeans and a heavy wool shirt over a lighter long-sleeve wool undershirt, put on my coat and hat and gloves against the cold and walked the snowy path up the hill to the house. I heard a fox call from the edge of the woods as I went, and then I stepped up onto Tanowei’s front porch and rapped on the door.
The door opened and Tanowei stood a moment looking at me. “Your hair is long like mine,” he said. “Japanese men don’t wear long hair. We are the strange ones. You must come in.”
I removed my boots and left them there in the genkan, stepped up onto the wood floor in my socks and followed him into the house past a stuffed Hokkaido brown bear standing on its hind legs. The bear’s mouth was open to display its white teeth and red tongue, shiny like the shiny black nose with its fluted nostrils, and I noticed the rounded and thick ears, the eyes black with no bottom. The paws were heavy and huge with black claws. Despite the effort of the taxidermist to impose a ferocity on the bear, to me it looked sad.
“She was killed legally by a licensed hunter,” Tanowei said. “She woke from her sleep a few winters ago and wandered into the village. She was in my orchard eating the fall apples under the snow.”
“Is that so?” I said.
“And do you know Ainu people in Hokkaido kill the bear in fall, eat it, and say prayers to the bear spirit? The bear is center of Ainu life. It is a very beautiful ceremony.”
“I did know that, yes,” I said. “Matsui told me all about it.”
“But they do not do like that anymore. There are not so many bears nowadays,” Tanowei said. “Once there were many bears.”
“It’s like that everywhere,” I said.
The house was open and spacious and more western looking than any of the other houses in the village. It seemed to be designed to concentrate light off the sea.
“You see,” Tanowei said. “It is very good for me to look onto the sea in the morning.”
“It looks very beautiful,” I said. Tanowei’s English was good, but we spoke simply and carefully because it wasn’t perfect.
“This is the house I will die in,” he said. “I should have died in the war, but I will die here. This is better.”
“You were in the war?” I asked.
“I was trained as a pilot in World War Two against your country,” he said. “But I wasn’t killed.”
“You must have been a very good pilot.”
“No,” he said. “Not good. I was training as a pilot, but Japan ran out of fuel and the planes were grounded so that is why I was not killed.”
“You were lucky then,” I said.
“I suppose,” he said. “If I had flown, I would surely have been killed.” He paused to imagine being killed. “Did you know I am almost American? I was born in Hawaii. When the war started, I had to decide on my country and I chose Japan. Did you see my Ford truck outside?”
“I did,” I said.
“Like an American. But that truck is not American. It’s a Japanese Ford. Made in Japan. I made sure of that.”
As we spoke, there was a big war going on in Yugoslavia and another in Somalia. People were dying in terrible ways, but it was happening far away and it felt like an abstraction. To be here in Hokkaido like this with everything I needed felt to me like a splendor I had not earned, like I had entered into a floating world from which it would be impossible to return.
“Let me show you something else,” Tanowei said.
I followed Tanowei through the house and into a room with another door, which he opened.
“In here is the bath,” he said. “I built it to accommodate four people. Best in the village. You will come tonight for a bath. You have no bath in that small house.”
“That sounds very nice,” I said.
“You will surely have supper with Yonezawa, and he will come up with the children for a bath. You will come along with him.”
Yonezawa was Tanowei’s son, who lived close by in Hidaka with his wife and five children.
Then Tanowei said, “There is one more thing. Follow me.”
I followed Tanowei back through the house to the genkan where we put on our boots. We walked out and away from the house through an orchard of leafless trees as Tanowei called them out for me—“apple, pear, peach, I want to grow almonds too. Oh, this is where the bear was killed”—and out to the edge where he had piled cuttings from the trees to compost. The orchard was tidy, well cared for, very organized. Tanowei showed me three big metal drums standing upright in a row.
“In here,” he said, lifting the top from one of the drums. Inside were a series of spits stretched across, each hung with translucent dried squid all the way to the bottom. “I dry my own squids,” he said. “Very delicious.”
I happened to love dried squid.
“What were these barrels used for before the squid?” I asked.
“These are from squids only,” he said. “Here. Please try.”
The squid was tangy and sweet and soft.
“Here, take more.” Tanowei handed me five or six squid he pulled from the top spit. “Now let’s have American breakfast. I must cook it. I would have my wife cook it, but she is dead.”
Back in the house, Tanowei made toast, fried bacon, and eggs. He poured me a coffee and asked me what I would do with the rest of my day. I told him I would do very little but read and nap and look out the windows of the small house at the sea and be present for the place and for myself. And maybe I would exercise. I studied his face as I talked. His face was creased and reddened like the inner flesh of a peach where the pit comes away.
“This is very good what you are doing,” he told me. “This is the human life.”
After breakfast I returned to the small house along the path through the snow, removed my boots and went in. The sun came in hard through the big windows and I felt it warm and soft over my back and on my hair where I sat now at the kotatsu. I wrote all of it down in my notebook as I remembered it having just happened even as it was happening as I wrote it. My legs were warm in the kotatsu, and I felt the difference of the colder air on my face and in my hands. I recalled what Tanowei had told me: “If leg is warm, body is warm.”
After a short nap in the sleeping loft, I readied myself for supper with Yonezawa and his family.
Yonezawa worked as the lead veterinarian for a team of veterinarians who worked with racehorses. Hidaka was particularly well-suited to raising racehorses because the mountains shielded the coast from storms and deep snow. The most valuable racehorses in all of Japan were here, and a good number of foreigners, especially Australians, came to train and care for the horses.
Yonezawa pulled up at the small house in his Pajero and we drove along the Pacific with the sun on the horizon past the racetrack in the village and arrived at his house. We were greeted at the door by his wife, Miyu, and a dog, rib-bare and skulky, wearing a diaper. She was a young dog, Yonezawa explained in his broken English, and she was in season. The diaper helped keep the menstrual blood from staining the furniture and rugs.
Miyu asked for my coat and hat as I removed my boots to step up onto the wood floor of the house where the children suddenly appeared all in a row. In order from oldest to youngest, they were called Miki, Tyki, Yuki, Koki, and Aki.
“Please, please, come in. Welcome,” Miyu said to me in Japanese. “Supper is almost ready.”
I sat down across the room from Yonezawa on a western style couch where the dog pressed up against my leg and put her head in my lap. She was a sweet dog, and I do not remember her name because I did not write it down in my notebook.
Miyu called us to supper and the family gathered around the table, a big nabemono soup pot in the middle, plated vegetables and cuts of beef and pork, and mochi in thick white blocks. Each place setting included a small empty bowl and a rice bowl filled with steaming rice. Yonezawa poured hot sake for me and then for himself. He raised a little toast, and we drank, and he filled the cups again. Miyu motioned to me to begin with the vegetables by putting what I wanted into the soup pot. She then demonstrated how to cook the meat by holding a thin cut in her chopsticks and stirring it about in the soup pot for about ten seconds. Then she dipped the meat in a tangy sauce and ate it. The Japanese call this shabu-shabu, for the stirring motion when cooking the meat. I had had shabu-shabu many times before, but I followed Miyu’s instruction, and when I tried the meat, I expressed my surprise and delight. This made Miyu very happy, and she motioned for me to add more vegetables and try more meat. Then everyone joined in. After the vegetables had cooked in the soup for several minutes, Miyu took up my bowl and ladled it full of soup with vegetables. We added more of everything to the pot as we took from it, cooking and eating, drinking the soup from our bowls and refilling them, and drinking the sake.
Miki, the oldest daughter, picked up the mochi plate and dropped in a few blocks. Mochi is cooked rice pounded into a dense paste and then shaped and dried. It is also used to make sweets. Mochi is traditionally eaten on New Year’s morning in a miso-based soup called ozoni for strength and nutrition to make it through the long winter. Mochi softens and becomes pliable like taffy in the soup pot. Miki motioned to me to take one of the pieces from the pot, and I did.
When the meal was done, Yonezawa said to me, “Tomorrow you will meet the mayor of Hidaka. I want you to live here and teach English to the children in the village. But now it is time to take the bath. We will take you to Tanowei.”
We all loaded into the Pajero and drove up the coast, the moon shining brightly off the sea the way it does in postcards, and then we went up the hill to Tanowei’s house. Tanowei told me that the children would bathe first, then Yonezawa and Miyu, and then I would have the bath to myself.
I sat with Tanowei and drank more sake while the family bathed. Tanowei told me that it would be very good if I would come here and teach the children English. “You have a job already,” he said, “but this is a better job.”
When the family finished bathing, it was my turn. I undressed and left my clothes neatly folded on a bench outside the bathhouse. Stepping inside, I sat on the low stool before a mirror and shower wand and washed carefully and intentionally. I used soap and shampoo and scrubbed myself clean. Then I rinsed well, making sure to cleanse myself of all the soap and shampoo. The bath was constructed of stone and the edges of it rose above the floor a little. I slipped into the clean water, hot and soothing and easy, and even as I was alone, I soaked in the pool with modesty as if I shared the bath with others. There was nothing to do in the bath except be in the bath, and that is where I was. I sat and soaked and allowed that water to take something out of me even as it put something back in, and I was happy and grateful, and I closed my eyes.
After a time, I dressed and went out into the main room of the house. Yonezawa and Miyu had gone, taking the children with them. I said goodnight to Tanowei and thanked him and stepped out into the darkened woods. I walked down the snowy path and through the trees. It wasn’t far, but with the moon that way and shadows from the trees long on snow, it felt farther than it was. My boots made a crying sound on the snow as I walked, and I heard the sharp, easy barks of the foxes from the darkness. I arrived at the small house and climbed the ladder to the sleeping loft. In the morning, I would wake to work again at the table with the kotatsu to warm me from the outside and the coffee to awaken me from the inside. I would stay here at the small house until after the turning of the new year.
